If this is your first visit be sure to check out the FAQ. You have to REGISTER before you can post. To start viewing threads, select the forum that you want to visit from the list below.NOTICE: YOUR ACCESS HAS BEEN LIMITED UNTIL YOU REGISTER!

In order to ensure your registration and verification goes smoothly and quickly you should edit your user profile and add some content that verifies your not a robot. Add an avatar or profile image, add some location information, setup your signature, send the admin a quick private message, etc. You can make these changes by clicking on "Settings" in the top right corner of the site. Once inside your personal settings control panel, you can click on edit profile or any of the other options to begin your customizations.

Doing this will help the forum moderators verify your registration and allow you access to the entire forum.If you refuse to do this or take steps to verify your humanity, there is a very good chance your account will be deleted instead of verified.Users that look suspicious or have suspicious email addresses and users with no profile information will be deleted without warning.

Since this is clearly not true as to federal income tax rates, to what then do you refer?

The ending of the FICA payroll tax break of 2%? It's not an increase, but the ending of the time-limited temporary cuts, as scheduled. Frankly, except for Obama's strong insistence before, these would already have expired 2 years ago, from the GOP's opposition to them and their extension O won at that time. Putting it another way, the American people have been paying 6.2% FICA payroll tax FOREVER (well, at least since the Reagan/Greenspan Commission deal in the mid-'80s raised them there from 4.2%). What will they be paying now, after your alleged tax hike? 6.2%.

It's semantics, again. Nobody raised that tax. Someone LOWERED it, temporarily, and the temporary nature of that lowering was known in the original bill lowering it. That temporary lowering ended, although it was first extended for another temporary period. So you're saying that anyone providing a temporary tax break is also raising taxes, although the taxes never are raised from the status quo ante, even after they are 'raised'?

Well, why not claim that. After all, a similar (bad) argument worked great to gain the recall of the California governor Gray Davis.

Nobody thought you could parse any language with the slightest ambiguity. You've disabused us of any idea that is so, repeatedly.

Not that it's the weakest part of your claim. That would be this part: Why did the regime push to raise taxes on the middle class?

No evidence for that part at all, amiright? Before we get to the poor understanding you display about the meanings of words, let's deal first with this misstatement of the facts.

While we wait for your explanation of that claim, here's a comparable situation in the business world. When my company leases new space, we negotiate the base rent. Often, rent is waived for 3 months or more as compensation for our expense of build out. So, we go from paying $0 rent to paying full rent, after the waived period. Question: did our rent go up? Because we had to begin to pay what we'd negotiated as our exact rent?

You could say that, but it would lead to the odd claim that despite having a lease contract, somehow the landlord slipped us a rent increase. That isn't what happened, of course-- we were paying the same rate all along, AND there was an offsetting credit allowed. The rent didn't go up-- the credit went away.

I do believe that a full return to the Clinton-era tax rates is probably necessary, if we are to have a chance to re-right the fiscal ship under something like normal order. That's exactly what Simpson-Bowles recommended among many other steps. That's a key reason why Paul Ryan, leading the GOP faction on the panel to oppose S/B, wouldn't vote for it. It's what Alice Rivlin recommends as well. I think it is mistaken to make all these increases immediately, as does Alice Rivlin (although S/B said to do it immediately, iirc). Why? Because tax hikes ARE contractionary as to economic activity, and the largest part of the current deficits is the economic shortfall of this high UE situation. It's more important to get economic activity back up closer to trend than to try futile austerity measures.

What's been going on is that the way the American economy has been working for 30 years has been squeezing most households, as whatever share of the large amount of productivity gains received by the non-rich has mainly gone into larger health care costs in their compensation, not into real wage increases. A narrative sprung up that it was only the oppressive federal income tax that caused all these problems, and that by reducing that burden, things would be fixed. That monomania was never plausible, and it was a deliberate fraud in my opinion to hide the internal contradictions of our economic system and the choices imposed on it by the Galtian overlords.

The looting and rape of the economy by the MIC, the rent-seeking medical system, the titanically fraudulent banking system, those with vast fortunes, and etc. (mainly the same characters overlapping) cannot be much remedied by a tax cut or a tax credit, but that's been the mantra, which has been a dodge and a racket.

So, to be clear, long ago the idea of a sunsetted payroll tax, or a partial payroll tax rollback, was raised (by the GOP iirc)-- I opposed it at that time as an unwise measure that further threatened the longer term finances of SS. I think the reason Obama proposed it was the GOP pedigree, the idea that maybe it could get passed, and the emergency need for any kind of stimulus of money back into the hands of workers. As a short emergency policy, time-limited, I did support it. As the 10 year loss of tax revenues under a full extension of the Bush tax cut was scored at $4 trillion, and the making permanent those rates for all below the top bracket was most of it-- $3.2 trillions or so-- I also thought any such extension should be temporary, not permanent.

But politics intrude on these policy considerations, distorting what would be the correct economic policies by politically dictated defensive and offensive positions. When all options are bad, and one must choose a bad option that is least bad, people can easily get support against that option because, and they would be right, it is a bad option. And, still, it must be taken. It's the kind of brutal triage one can only learn from experience. People with less discernment, or a political animus, will never understand it, or will always pretend they don't understand it.

"I do believe that a full return to the Clinton-era tax rates is probably necessary, if we are to have a chance to re-right the fiscal ship under something like normal order."
The important thing iz full employment. Something that the usofa haznt had for a long time.
RE-RIGHT THE FISCAL SHIP -- iz a sort of lie.
NORMAL ORDER -- iz a sort of truth.
DISTORTING .... CORRECT ECONOMIC POLICIES -- read distorting krappynomix.
Even Krugman, the best krappynomicyst in the usofa, shows that despite all of hiz good stuff he iz a bit of a twirp.
mac.

I do believe that a full return to the Clinton-era tax rates is probably necessary, if we are to have a chance to re-right the fiscal ship under something like normal order. That's exactly what Simpson-Bowles recommended among many other steps.